Science & religion, origins, and consciousness

"Weinberg vs. a designed universe"
An essay donated by Don Stark

"God knows whether Dulcinea exists on earth or not,
or whether she is fantastical or not. These are not
matters where verification can be carried out to the full."
Cervantes, Don Quixote

If religion is to be viable it cannot abandon to science
natural phenomena such as quantum mechanics, as if quantum mechanics were
the property of science and not the common property of us all. Nor can
religion abandon philosophy as if all philosophy were vain philosophy. Logic
is not hostile to faith. The truths of philosophy and mathematics and the
mysteries of quantum mechanics and outer space belong to nature, and nature
belongs as much to religion as it does to science. If science has arrived at
a demonstrable truth, then that truth belongs to religion. If philosophy has
arrived at a logical truth, that truth belongs to religion. All demonstrable
truth belongs as much to religion as it does to any other discipline, and
should compel religion as much as it does any other discipline. Moreover, it
is the job of religion to make sure that the truth that science or
philosophy arrive at are verifiable by scientific and logical methods. That
means that religion can only benefit from a knowledge of science and
philosophy's methods. If religion holds science to what it can prove by
physical evidence, about whether the universe is designed or not, religion
will be consoled by what science finds.

Religion's blessing and curse, however, is that it is not bound by the
methods of science or of logic. This difference is at the heart of the
debate between religion and science. Science is compelled to use
demonstrable models, and they would compel religion to do the same if it is
to be believed. But religion is not driven by physical demonstration but by
faith. Unless it is bound by love for humanity in general, religion is
dangerous. Few people make this point more often than the late Carl Sagan.
His "Demon Haunted World" accurately describes the world of carnage
that religions have wrought. 2
However, it is logical that if carnage fills our world, religious people
have wreaked most of it, because most people in the world, and in history,
are religious. Were the world and history peopled with atheists their
carnage may have equaled religions; we don't know. But if the Stalinist,
Maoist and Pol Pot eras are any indication, perhaps we are better off with
the devil of religion we know rather than the atheistic devil of which these
eras have given us a mere peek.

Scientific theories fail to explain why there is something rather than
nothing. It is a failure shared by religious and philosophical theories as
well. Religiously speaking, if there is no god, we do not know why there
exists something rather than nothing. If there is a god, we don't know why
he created physical existence rather than to have left it uncreated. And as
to philosophy's pursuit of why there is something rather than nothing, logic
never arrives conclusively at an original cause of which existence is the
effect. Lacking such proof, how shall I, a professed Christian, demonstrate
that it is more logical to conclude that the universe exists because it was
created, than it is to explain that existence just is -- that ours is an
accidental universe as scientists describe it.

Scientists almost always confuse the parameters for this debate. They are
physicists, but usually resort to non-physical moral and ethical arguments
against arguments for design. To illustrate this confusion, consider Physics
Nobel prize laureate, Steven Weinberg's "A Designer Universe?" found
on numerous web searches in physics and cosmology. 3 This is an essay about
whether or not the universe shows signs of having been designed. Weinberg is
a physicist so I assume that he is asked to give a scientific assessment of
this question. His essay, however, is hardly a scientific argument against
design. It is an ethical/moral argument against a benevolent designer. As
such his very frame of reference is not physical but psychological, that is,
spiritual. If his argument disproves a theory that says that a spiritual
force created the universe, it will have done so by spiritual means.

Weinberg's first point is that he cannot talk about the universe as designed
unless he has "some vague idea of what a designer would be like." This is no
scientific premise. One may find a humming, turning metal alloy
machine -- something of a giant Paley's watch -- and have no idea of its purpose
or its designer and suspect that something designed this thing. The several
polished and oiled parts are together by no volition of their own -- metal can't think
-- in an assembly of balance and complexity. Since the assembly
was obviously devised, and metal cannot devise, it is logical to conclude
that something other than the individual parts devised and assembled this
machine. The reason for this machine's existence, whatever it is, is not in
the parts but in the parts as they function together toward some mysterious
end; remove a part and the machine no longer hums and turns. These things we
may know about the machine that tell us virtually nothing about what the
designer is like. Should we find that this machine exists to bring pain -- a
torture machine -- then we may ask about the morals of the designer, but that
is no physics question. It is not logical therefore for a physicist to
conclude that because the machine is a torture machine it can't have been
designed, because no designer this intelligent would create a torture
machine. In fact, we are part of this particular machine, this world, and
the most fundamental question to begin with is one we must ask ourselves:
how can psychological (spiritual) questions be asked in and about a purely
accidental material world? Is there, in fact, such a thing as good and evil
upon which to found an ethics?

This world is often a torture machine, whatever else it
may be. Any of us have a legitimate reason to ask why, Weinberg included,
but we ask from a moral/ethical reference, not a scientific one. It's a
question that many Christians -- but by no means all -- avoid or dismiss with the
story of The Garden of Eden. The art and matter of Eden itself
demands interpretation. It is a story too complex to be used as a historical
justification or dismissal of the question of why there is evil in the
world. Surely the eating of forbidden fruit is
no infraction grave enough to have brought the wrath of God down on all
humans, none of whom were born at the time of the infraction, and none of
whom were guilty except Adam and Eve. To insist that god was justified in
condemning all humankind because of the infraction of their first parents is
to make nonsense of our God given moral compass, Milton notwithstanding.

One can accept that the laws and the individual parts of the universe are so
assembled that it is illogical to conclude that the parts assembled
themselves or were assembled accidentally, without having to explain the
moral reason for why they were assembled as they were. Existence is horrible
at times, and I don't know why. But physics compels me to believe, or at
least to consider, that the universe was intelligently assembled -- it turns
and hums. If I accept science that tells me how unbelievably improbable our
path has been from the big bang to now, I cannot logically not consider it.
Once I consider that possibility, then I have an insight into Leibniz's
question -- why something rather than nothing --that physical matter alone could
never ask. Once I ask this psychological question, I am compelled to ask
another: why is this something designed as it is and not otherwise? Atheists
should feel compelled to ask why there is something rather than nothing, and
theists cannot escape asking why the something is created as it is and not
otherwise. Both must realize, however, that neither answer can be perfectly
satisfactory, probably because we could not understand the answer if it were
told us.

Weinberg says that:

"the human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to
understand, but so is the weather. "We can't predict whether it will rain
one month from today, but we do know the rules that govern the rain..."

He sees nothing, he says, about the human mind that is
beyond the hope of understanding than is the weather. Let me suggest that
should Weinberg ever perceive the weather perceiving us and asking why, from
moral or scientific reasons, it and we exist, then he would surely be
convinced that the laws that rule the weather have suddenly taken on a
complexity that the weather's simple material cannot account for.

Weinberg follows the weather observation with the observation that "human
beings are the result of natural selection acting over millions of years..."
This brush stroke, prevalent among cosmologists, conceals more than it
reveals. It is not significant that it took a long, circuitous rout to
arrive at intelligent life -- the human being. The primary significance of
human beings is their intelligence, and to say that it took us a long time
to gain intelligence is no explanation for what intelligence is or how we
posses it. Should the weather or a plant or animal evolve to ask the
questions humans ask, then unless we can give a better explanation than that
they came to do so "over millions of years of breeding and eating," we must
admit that we cannot account for intelligence. We know it is there, we know
that it deals with thought and logic and mathematics -- which have no material
existence -- but how it is there and why it is there and what it is, we do not
know. Here is what Roger Penrose of Oxford (under whom Stephen Hawking
received his Doctorate) says:

"A scientific world-view which does not profoundly come to term with the
problems of conscious minds can have no serious pretensions of completeness.
Consciousness is part of our universe, so any physical theory which makes no
proper place for it falls fundamentally short of providing a genuine
description of the world. I would maintain that there is yet no physical,
biological or computational theory that comes very close to explaining our
consciousness and consequent intelligence..."1

I do however, share Weinberg's opinion (with the exception of subjective
experiences which can't be used in an objective essay) that the fundamental
principles of nature appear to be "utterly impersonal." But I don't agree
that they are "without any special role for life." If one considers number
as special, rather than size, then the myriad life forms on earth alone,
living in every drop of water and covering every speck of land with plants
and animals, show that life is special. The number of these complex organisms
rivals the number of stars we can observe in our sky, or stars and planets
that have come to exist since the big bang.

Life's role is special if an exception to Newton's second law of
thermodynamics is special. Newton's second law of thermodynamics declares
that, as a general rule, things tend to chaos. Life, however, exists as an
exception to this general rule. It stops chaos in its tracks and rearranges
matter in an order more complex than the whole physical universe. That it
came together repeatedly over billions of years and against virtually
impossible odds makes it special if "special" has any meaning.

In his "Designer Universe?" Weinberg maintains that the universe is not so
finely tuned to accommodate life as some physicists have argued. The example
these physicists give is the occurrence of carbon, which is essential to
life, and the narrow parameters within which carbon is produced. Weinberg
shows how the parameters for carbon are not as close as these physicists
suppose they are, because carbon can be produced in ways that these
physicists have not taken into account. I have no idea who is right, I am no
physicist, but I do know that however essential it is to life, carbon is not
life, especially not conscious life. One may know that gas is necessary to
make his car run and have no conception of what an internal combustion
engine is. It is unlikely that Weinberg can tell how conscious life began if
he cannot tell what it is.

Weinberg is right that science explains more adequately than religion what
the natural laws are, and why, if they were "slightly different" we would
find ourselves in "logical absurdities." But that point only emphasizes the
balance in the machine, the why of which science has no idea. He is also
right that religious theories are infinitely flexible, such that they are
useless in describing the laws of nature. He is wrong, however, in saying
that the tuning that brought about life is not as fine tuned as some
scientist claim, and religion is right to say that such fine tuning is
absurd if not miraculous. Perhaps these things are not as fine tuned in some
areas, but in others they are fine tuned to a mystifying degree. We can't
know how fine tuned things have to be to bring about the universe -- what fine
tuning is there between is and is not? It is telling that in precisely the
instance when his expertise is called on, it fails him. "I have to admit
that, even when physicists will have gone as far as they can go. When we
have a final theory, we will not have a completely satisfying picture of the
world."

Nor will religion, at least not Christianity. Christianity knows that it
cannot have a completely satisfying picture of the world until God makes the
world -- including Christians -- more satisfactory, until He reconciles the world
to himself (II Cor. 5: 18, 19; NIV).

Weinberg concludes his essay with a personal note about his own reasons
for not believing in a designer: his mother died of cancer, his father was
destroyed by Alzheimer's disease, and scores of his second and third cousins
were murdered in the holocaust. For him, he
says, "signs of a benevolent designer are pretty well hidden." Weinberg's
reasons for atheism are good reasons. They shake
me because I have no answer for why a good god would allow such misery to
continue. I consider my own argument for design shallow when compared with
the questions the existence of evil compels me to ask. But in hopes that
there will be some reconciliation between Weinberg's misery and my own near
ecstasy at times, I must point out that Weinberg's description of pain and
death in the world is drawn from a moral/ethical framework that physics
cannot account for, and upon which religion rests. Valid though his argument
is as a moral/ethical observation, it does not
dismiss a designer as the most probable reason for this turning, humming
well organized mechanical device we call the universe.